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The Front National and fascism

Submitted by Matthew on 3 May, 2017 - 9:00
Author: Martin Thomas

France’s Front National, which now has a real though outside chance of gaining the country’s powerful presidency, is not a fascist movement comparable to the Nazis or Mussolini’s Fascist Party when they were on the eve of power in the 1920s and 30s. Neither, however, is it a conventional hard-right party like UKIP or Germany’s AfD. The makeover the FN has given itself since 2011 is a makeover.

When Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the FN in 1972, it took the Italian party claiming to represent Mussolini’s heritage, the MSI, as a model. In the 1990s, the MSI renounced its fascist heritage, and eventually merged into a mainstream right party. The FN has not done that. The FN still has a fascist core cadre and a fascist ideology. It functions as the electoral-political wing of a broader fascist current. It softens and dresses up its message to win votes, but it fits the characterisation of fascism outlined by Leon Trotsky in the 1930s: “a plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat and even to a certain extent, from the proletarian masses… with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement”.

Fits it, except that it is still way short of being a mass movement. Its ideology is structured by characteristic themes of fascism:

• Exaltation of “the nation”, against mysterious global elites and against individuals, as the guiding value of politics. Marine Le Pen denounces the legacy of France’s great general strike and near-revolution of May-June 1968 in these terms: “May 68 promoted individualism. An individualism which has upended the foundations of our society”. Her social demagogy, pretending to stand up for the worse-off and for social provision, is tied into that exaltation of “the nation” and an insistence that social provision must first be for real French people.

• A leader cult. Both under Marine Le Pen, and under her father Jean-Marie, the FN has promoted its leader above all else, and given that leader absolute powers within the party.

• A cult of the state. In her closing speech at the FN congress where she was made leader, in 2011, Marine Le Pen declared: “Today, when globalisation rages and everything is collapsing, we still have the State… When things have to be regulated, protected, innovated, one naturally turns to the State”.

Since its foundation the FN has operated in conditions of bourgeois democracy and capitalist economy more stable than in the 1930s, when Trotsky and other Marxists plausibly believed that political and economic collapse was certain, in one country after another, unless a socialist revolution could be made within a few years or so. Its active base remains small compared to that of the 1920s and 30s fascist movements. It has 50,000-odd paid-up members, who function almost exclusively as electoral campaigners. Its “stewarding squad”, the DPS, had a fearsome reputation in the early years, but even then was cautious and weak compared to the street-fighting squads of 1920s and 30s fascism. Today the FN instead contracts out its stewarding to a commercial security firm, Colisée.

The Nazis at the start of 1933 had 1.5 million members in their party, and 425,000 (some not party members) in their paramilitary SA. Mussolini’s Fascist Party was formed from his “fighting squads” at the end of 1921, and then had 300,000 members. The twist, however, is that Colisée is not just any security firm. It was founded by Axel Loustau, a former cadre of the brazenly fascist student group GUD (Groupe Union Défense). Loustau also runs a printing company, Presses de France, which has produced the FN’s publicity materials since another company, Riwal, run by Fréderic Chatillon, a former comrade of Loustau’s in the GUD, was banned from doing so in a court case over political-finance laws.

Although Loustau and Chatillon have no high posts in the FN, they and other GUD-ers are among the closest advisers of Marine Le Pen. They also keep links with the GUD. division of labour The division of labour which FN leaders see between their caffe latte and a varying range of France’s espresso fascist grouplets was candidly summed up by Jean-Marie Le Pen — become, at the age of 87, garrulous and reckless — in November 2015. The Parti Nationaliste Français was being revived to regroup the members of L’Oeuvre Française, a brazenly fascist group active since 1968 but now banned by the government. Jean-Marie Le Pen wrote to the PNF conference: “Jeune Nation and Oeuvre Française, behind their founder Pierre Sidos, have led an independent national struggle for several decades in parallel to the Front National of which I was president. We have the same goal: to save our homeland and its French people from a decadence which we know to be deadly.

“The tsunami of immigration calls for a general mobilisation of patriots and the coordination of all national movements. Each one of these movement should be stronger and stronger in its own sector”.

How much Marine Le Pen can do if she wins the presidency, we still don’t know. A part of the mainstream right, led by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, has rallied to her. Will others? If she wins, how will the FN do in the June legislative elections? Mussolini, even with his 300,000 members and with an Italian ruling class anxious for revenge after the factory occupations in 1920, took four years to impose a full fascist regime. If details of history had turned differently, it might have been overthrown in that time.

Le Pen cannot move as fast as Mussolini. But it is entirely imaginable that she can do harm in France on the lines of what Putin, Erdogan, or Orban have been doing recently in Russia, Turkey, Hungary.

The FN’s official line on the trade unions is that its desired changes in the law will make them bigger and better but needing fewer strikes. But Nazi leaders before 1933 such as Gregor Strasser declared: “We consider the organisation of workers into trade unions an absolute necessity… As a workers’ party, National Socialism recognises the right to strike without restriction”. The FN’s opinion of France’s biggest union confederation, the CGT, is: “The CGT shows its true face: still the transmission belt for a far left which is moribund but still pseudo-revolutionary and often ultra-violent”.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the FN, first came into politics as a teenager in the late 1940s with Action Française. AF had been founded in 1899, as part of the agitation around the Dreyfus affair: monarchist, Catholic-traditionalist, obsessed with hostility to Freemasons, for whom it blamed such events as the French Revolution of 1789-94. In 1956, he became an MP for the quasi-fascist Poujadist movement. He served in the French army in its colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. He did not join the Organisation Armée Secrète, a group of French army officers and Algerian settlers who sought by terrorism to stop France ceding independence to Algeria in 1962, and killed thousands in Algeria and some dozens in France; but in 1965 he was the campaign manager for the presidential campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a veteran fascist who denounced the “abandonment” of Algeria.

After May 1968, new fascist groups sprouted, like the GUD and L’Oeuvre Française, focused on fighting the left and “communism” rather than the older enemies. They were mainly student-based. What they did is illustrated by a May 1969 episode recounted in a left-wing pamphlet of the 1970s.

Some 40 fascists set out from their base in the law faculty in the rue d’Assas in Paris to leaflet a high school. They trashed the student union office. The students gathered in the school canteen and pelted the fascists with missiles. The fascists retaliated with a hand-grenade. One school student had to have a hand amputated, but the fascists lost the battle. They lost more battles than they won, and in 1972, some of the fascist groups decided to create an electoral wing. Le Pen, who had been running a small business, had the electoral experience to impose himself as leader.

The FN did poorly in the 1970s, but survived. In 1977 Le Pen inherited a palace and a large fortune from a plutocrat whom he had befriended. He kept the fortune for himself rather than ceding it to the FN, and it helped him raise himself as a political figure above the formal structures of the FN (which were authoritarian enough, explicitly modelled on those of the Stalinised Communist Party). In 1983, the FN made a breakthrough, winning control of a small town in northern France in alliance with a section of the mainstream right. Some of the mainstream right excused their alliance with the FN by saying it was anyway not as bad as the then Socialist Party government including Communist Party ministers. The Socialist Party president, François Mitterrand, helped the FN get media coverage so as to make trouble for the mainstream right.

The FN has had ups and downs since then, and is still relatively weak in most of France’s big cities — only 5% of the vote in Paris. But it has gained in smaller towns, particular in “rust-belts”. Since becoming FN leader in 2011, Marine Le Pen has publicly campaigned to “de-demonise” the FN. Some FN leaders are openly gay. One leader, Louis Aliot, Marine Le Pen’s partner, boasts of his part-Jewish background. That makes her a canny fascist, and one born in 1968 rather than focused on the battles of long-past decades.

Her father made most of the big shifts in the FN’s profile — to try to distance it from lost causes of the past, and to align it to a broader electorate in an era when the threat of USSR “communism” no longer scares, when an increasing majority of France’s Muslim population are French-born and French-speaking. Jean-Marie Le Pen went for the FN: • describing itself as “neither left nor right” rather than “far right” • defining itself as “republican” and “secular”, and as respecting the heritage of the French Revolution • coming out for social provision and welfare (for the French, not immigrants) rather than as hardline free-market, and making a specific pitch to workers • accepting that a large chunk of the North-African-origin population is now French, and in France to stay.

He deliberately installed Marine Le Pen as his successor, pushing aside the old-fascist, Catholic-traditionalist, Bruno Gollnisch, explaining it thus: “I am tied by solidarities which I can’t break, from the [World] war… from my mates in [the colonial army] in Indochina and Algeria, from the pied-noirs… Marine is much more free”. He started a sustained attempt to build bridges to conservative Jews and to Israel. He blew it up with a notorious statement on TV about the gas chambers being only “a detail” of World War Two, but that may have been more off-hand garrulousness and stubborn refusal to apologise than deliberation.

Marine Le Pen’s new focus on France being threatened by twin “totalitarian” dangers, “globalism” and the EU on one side, “islamisation” on the other, sharpens the fascist edge of FN ideology.

Comments

I think your article very much reflects the real panic which seized many Far Left and Left militants between the two rounds of the Presidential elections. Many intellectuals, bloggers, journalists, militants, etc. tried to convince us (us the 16 millions of abstentionnists) that fascism was on the corner, that we should all vote Macron (who said he is going to change the electoral system and therefore give more power to the NF particularly in the Parliamentary elections in 2022) and used for that aim all sorts of arguments, reinforcing the fascist traits of the National Front and not taking into account the French electoral system and its dynamics, notably the two-rounds system which impedes the NF to get a significant number of seats…. unless the traditional Right makes a significant deal with the NF which has not been the case for the moment except in some very exceptional occasions and on a local basis.

Anyway, the most important is neither to stick this or that label on the NF (fascist, national-populist, far right, etc.) nor to check if the classical definition of fascism fits or not with the NF acts and theories. The most important for me is

- to acknowledge the NF is a very dangerous party for bourgeois democracy (so obvioulsy for the workers movement), even on the local level (See my article about the NF manages the commune of Hénin Beaumont and how the local Left is impotent
http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article2584
which I'll try to translate as soon as possible or the other articles I already wrote on the NF in English http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article2077
and http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article2078
which will be soon available in book form)

- to acknowledge at the same time that for the moment the NF does not use the same methods as traditional fascist parties...

Therefore we have to be a bit more imaginative than just copying « United Front » tactics which anyway failed in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Chili, etc. In other words to call for the unity of the alleged Left against « fascism » has no meaning if we dont draw the lessons of the previous failures of antifascism. Your article does not dwell on that and it’s a pity because we have to start with a serious balance of past mistakes if we dont want to reproduce them or just repeat empty slogans.

As far as I know, no significant group in the Left or the Far Left fights even for a ban of the NF, a minimal common point which could unite « antifascists » if they seriously think fascism is a concrete threat today and if they are serious about the fascist nature of the NF.

No significant group is ready to forbid NF meetings by violent militant mass actions if the Parliament or the State does not do it.

No significant group is ready to physically confront the DPS, the fascist grouplets or other forces.
So what should we do ?

Old recipes wont work as have shown the last 40 years in France. Almost every tactics has been tried and has failed : the street confrontation of the LC and Maoists in the 1970s ; the passivity and absenteism of Lutte ouvrière which was supposed to build a workers party and deal later with the NF danger ; the moral denounciations of the reformist Left; the call to vote Chirac and today Macron which has not stopped the doubling of the NF votes between 2012 and 2017.

Here was the (very general I agree) conclusion of my articles written in 2014

"We have to come back to some basic old revolutionary ideas:
– elections should NOT be our main field of activity, contrary to the tradition of the French Far Left during the last 40 years ;
– we should always put forward internationalist or, better, anationalist principles and slogans instead of courting nationalist prejudices as the Far Left often does on national or international matters ; we should wage an ideological/cultural fight against the Far Right and the New Right, but also against all those who, in the Left or the working class movement, propagate, consciously or unconsciously, their ideas ;
– our class is not the “99%” of humanity but the working class, which means a social revolution will imply some drastic choices and will not equally satisfy the immediate needs of everybody on this planet, from the former capitalist or executive to the former poorest farmer ;
– there are no shortcuts: elections campaigns, dubious political alliances with Reformists in the name of antiracism of antifascism will never replace our own socialist propaganda and patient local organizational work in working class districts, inside the workplaces, inside the schools and universities, supporting migrant workers struggles and self-organization ;
– We will never “transform the world “if we do not destroy the state. No nice workers’ cooperative, no friendly fair trade association, no radical liberated zone, will ever free us from the rule of capitalism. »

OUtside this political basis I dont see any possible progress in the struggle of the Far Left against the NF whether you think it’s fascist or not.
Any illusion that voting for Leftwing candidates will stop fascism is a nonsense (opposed to all the lessons of history) and a criminal illusion.

The SP, CP, Greens, etc. will not do anything against the NF if they are in power, locally or nationally. They will calmy discuss with the NF as they have done since the NF has gained many municipal and regional councillors and a few mayors and MPs. They will complain and pitifully cry that the NF does not respect democracy buy they will not confront the NF seriously by force or even using the law against the NF.

Even Lutte ouvrière who did not want to shake hands with SP regional councillors a few years ago because they were class traitors has accepted to be on the same photo as Marine Le Pen (and debate with her) for a TV show recently while at least Poutou, the NPA candidate, refused this time to participate to the photo joke even if he participated to the debate which is a rather contradictory attitude. But anyway LO and the NPA have accepter for years to discuss with fascists in the media (radio and TV shows), as if there was anything to discuss with them in a democratic and rational way.

I will welcome any positive proposals and ideas on your side and on the AWL’s side if you are serious (and I am sure you are) about the fascist danger in France and elsewhere.

Yours

Yves Coleman, Ni patrie ni frontières

P.S. I can maybe add that the Left and Far Left are not ready to confront racist and nationalist prejudices which are the main reasons for the NF growing influence outside the traditional petty bourgeoisie and to fight for
- right to vote for all foreigners
- right for foreigners to be hired in all public services
- equal rights for all social benefits (housing, health, education, etc.)
- welcoming all refugees, etc.
These basic demands have NEVER been central or even important in any electoral campaign of the Left and Far Left during the last 40 years/